Author: David Wright

Some detail on the top three jury verdicts in 2012 (#1 is 716m, a big increase from last year):

The year’s massive top verdict [$716,500,000] was awarded against a convenience store for selling alcohol to a teenager who plowed into another vehicle, killing its occupant. The #2 verdict went to three workers burned in an explosion at a grain silo who were awarded more than $179 million against ConAgra Foods for failing to clean up stored wheat that became combustible.

More here.

By the way, this sort of thing is why insurance costs go up each year. By the link’s measure, the top verdicts are 10% higher than last year, which were 10% higher than the year before.

But even so, that 716m one is a bit ridiculous (from a convenience store?!). Here is a bit more detail:

How much the Garcia family actually will receive from the millions the jury awarded is uncertain, Gilbert said. But it’s important that the jury sent a message, he said.

“The amount of justice that this family got out of this verdict you can’t put a number on it,” Gilbert said.

Gilbert, I have little doubt, does not mean to “send a message” to the consumers of America to spend more on chocolate bars and bottled water because convenience stores raise prices to cover the increased cost of insurance.

Here is a post debunking the “standard placebo narrative”: that there is a magical mind-over-matter process going on that heals of of our ills. In other words, the placebo effect is real.

What is measured in the placebo response includes things like reporting bias, or the desire of subjects to feel better, to please their doctor or the researcher, and to justify their prior decisions (to trust the doctor, take the treatment, enter the study, etc.). Begley fails to distinguish, in other words, between the pain that patients feel and the pain that they report. In studies we never know and cannot measure how much pain patients feel, only how much pain they report. Anything that would affect that reporting will also be lumped into “the placebo response” that is measured in the placebo arm of the study.

This is not quibbling. There is good reason to believe that reporting bias may be the major component of measured placebo effects.

And also very interesting is this study that finds no objective placebo effect. The benefits aren’t real.

In fact Begley did not mention the now famous (or infamous, I guess, depending on your perspective) study by Kaptchuk in which he studied both objective and subjective outcomes in asthma in response to active and placebo interventions. The results – there was a measured placebo response to subjective outcomes, but none for objective outcomes. Asthma is a condition susceptible to things like anxiety and expectation – so it provided a good opportunity to demonstrate objective improvement from placebo interventions, but showed none. This study, while very telling, does not fit the placebo narrative that journalists like to tell, and so is often absent from such articles or misinterpreted when present.

 

The NJ Police union just gave Eli Manning, a resident of my town of Hoboken, a lifetime card of some sort. Here is the description from the article:

It is a highly coveted membership, and card-holders are treated with the utmost courtesy and respect by all in the law enforcement community.

So how it works is that you put in your car window to make sure you get treated with respect.

That’s nice.

This is Kevin Kelly:

[Robert Gordon] is trying to argue that the consequences of the 2nd Industrial Revolution, which bought to common people electricity and plumbing, was far more important than the computers and internet which the 3rd Industrial Revolution has brought us. (Gordon’s 1st Industrial revolution was steam and railroads.) As evidence of this claim he offers this hypothetical choice between option A and option B.

With option A you are allowed to keep 2002 electronic technology, including your Windows 98 laptop accessing Amazon, and you can keep running water and indoor toilets; but you can’t use anything invented since 2002. Option B is that you get everything invented in the past decade right up to Facebook, Twitter, and the iPad, but you have to give up running water and indoor toilets. You have to haul the water into your dwelling and carry out the waste. Even at 3am on a rainy night, your only toilet option is a wet and perhaps muddy walk to the outhouse. Which option do you choose?

Gordon then goes on to say:

I have posed this imaginary choice to several audiences in speeches, and the usual reaction is a guffaw, a chuckle, because the preference for Option A is so obvious.

KK then tells us about some people who have Facebook but no flush toilets:

This area of Yunnan is consider one of the poorer areas in China, and the standard of living of the inhabitants here would be classified as “poor.”

Part of the reason is that these homes have no running water, no grid electricity, and no toilets. They don’t even have outhouses.

But the farmers and their children who live in these homes all have cell phones, and they have accounts on the Chinese versions of Twitter and Facebook, and recharge via solar panels…

Now, it isn’t clear that these people have had to make the choice between flush toilets and Facebook. But even if they had, I bet they’d be very tempted by Facebook. I spent a weekend in rural China many years ago and lived without flush toilets there. It isn’t so bad.

But only if I ignore externalities: indoor plumbing isn’t just about personal hygiene, it’s also about public health and disease control. Ask the rural Chinese if they’d choose Cholera and E Coli over Facebook you might get a different answer.

Considering their full benefits, I don’t think there’s any question that those older technologies are better in just about every conceivable way except one: they’re really expensive to install. That’s what’s cool about this (third by Kelly’s count) industrial revolution. Walk down to the shop and buy a phone and you’ve got Facebook. Not so easy to install plumbing in an entire town.

This video (hat tip) is about bodybuilder Kai Greene. Here is what Kai has to say about Bodybuilding…

A lot of bobybuilders go off track right here… I’m going to show you how it’s done… [first] you get yourself some Tupperware.

The point, as Kai drives home again and again and again is that he needs to eat every two hours every day. In order to do that he needs to always have food on him. In order to do that he has to cook it. Every day. To do that… well, let’s let Kai explain what it means to do that:

[you need to be able to] get up, cook you meals, pack them, have them with you and follow thorugh with eating them every two or three hours.

I’m not talking about focusing on how many grams of [protein, carbs, fat]… what I’m focusing on here is the development of character which speaks to your ability to follow through and start to string together days of efficient action on the very basic level.

…to have your food with you every day all day, in order for you to be able to eat on time and allows you to stay in an anabolic state. Now you start talking about the things that scientifically that can suppost cellular growth and muslce repair.

But if you are still working without the strength of character, without the ability to follow through, then all that complex converstaion about those sciences will mean very very little, will mean nothing to you.

…No one should stay over you: did you eat, are you on top of your schedule. Are you staying true to your path?

At the end of the day it’s just not important to everybody else. And if it’s more important to other people than it is you then there’s a large part of your better potential that will. not. be. tapped.

There’s often little that surprises in ‘inspirational’ videos: hero overcomes odds with hard work and perseverance and wins. The reality of high performance is of course that it demands an extraordinary tolerance of routine.

Put another way, I believe that success comes from an ability to do the shit that nobody else wants to do. Or refuses to learn how to do. Or thinks they can’t learn to do. But here’s the secret: apply time to most any problem and it will relent. Eventually. For problems with really juicy rewards, it takes longer than most people would tolerate.

That’s drive. It ain’t romantic. It is slow and really, truly, boring. Numbingly boring.

I find this idea… glorious.

My favorite blog is Marginal Revolution, written by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok (both economists at George Mason University and the latter a Canadian!). Today they put out a list of their most popular posts of 2012, which contains a lot of great stuff. I’ll quote a few and paste a few awesome graphs below.

A Bet is a Tax on Bullshit ends with the money quote:

Overall, I am for betting because I am against bullshit. Bullshit is polluting our discourse and drowning the facts. A bet costs the bullshitter more than the non-bullshitter so the willingness to bet signals honest belief. A bet is a tax on bullshit; and it is a just tax, tribute paid by the bullshitters to those with genuine knowledge.

A simple theory of why so many smart young people go into finance, law, and consulting. A short piece; do read it.

Cowen goes at Robert Solow with both barrels in Robert Solow on Hayek and Friedman and MPS. Try this:

You can consider this essay a highly selective, error-laden, and disappointing account of a topic which could in fact use more serious scrutiny….

And Solow wonders why the Mont Pelerin Society and monetarism were needed. Solow should have started his piece with a sentence like “Milton Friedman was not right about everything, but most of his criticisms of my earlier views have been upheld by subsequent economic theory and practice….”

In Firefighters Don’t Fight Fires, we don’t even need quotes. We only need the graphs:

All in all, a great year from some of the best in the blogging biz.

“Yeah, we’re loaded,” the player said, exhaling after Detroit (4-8) lost its fourth consecutive game and third by four points or less. “But we have a couple of guys who don’t understand what it takes to win. Just making a couple of plays and thinking that makes you great … sometimes you want to just shake some of these guys and say, ‘Don’t you get it?'”

Anybody in particular?

“Ndamukong [Suh] would be first.”

More here.

Ever made a good point in a meeting? Answered a tough question in class? What did you do for the next few minutes? Sat around replaying your brilliance in your own mind is what, probably.

It’s common to view team situations as status competitions. Forget the goal for a sec, do they think I’m smart? Aren’t I the best looking person here? That joke I just made got a laugh, I bet everyone is thinking of how funny I am.

This focus on minutiae of individual interaction is incredibly destructive from a teamwork standpoint. It interrupts the most important characteristic of high performance: achieving ‘flow’. Flow is the mental state of perfect focus on the task at hand.

A lot of this has to do with how you define success. When am I allowed to gloat a bit, even privately? Selfishness notwithstanding, this can be a difficult thing to figure out. Here is a quote paraphrasing one of my favorite books in the world, The Mental ABCs of Pitching, I think about all the time:

Dorfman once approached Greg Maddux after a game and asked him how it went. Maddux said simply: “Fifty out of 73.” He’d thrown 73 pitches and executed 50. Nothing else was relevant.

We don’t know whether the Braves won that game. We don’t know how many strikeouts Maddux got or how many home runs were scored on him. There’s a beautiful purity to this evaluation: it strips away everything that Maddux doesn’t control. And Maddux doesn’t celebrate after a single well-thrown ball, like Suh is accused of doing. It is through the aggregation of successful execution that he succeeds.

But this also shows me that Greg Maddux isn’t a leader. A leader takes it upon himself to tackle, in addition to his own extremely difficult job, the hardest problem of all: collective performance.

Training, motivation, culture. Leadership is a separate skill, perhaps independent from individual performance. That’s why we have coaches and managers who can specialize in it.

But stars, like Greg Maddux and like Ndamukong Suh, have a special power: their individual achievements grant them very high status. Status that draws people to them, that grants them influence over others. High status makes leadership easier, probably, but still devilishly hard.

And for some, the gift of influence comes with an obligation to use it. This is the frustration from teammates who see the potential in Suh. And lament its waste.